Tag: conference

Angie Doyle (Linkedin | Twitter) and I were selected to present at Agile2018 this year in San Diego. Our workshop focussed on effectively lifting off (or forming) high performance teams.

Why is team lift-off important?

We believe in the power of aligning teams upfront through conversation – ensuring that we are focussed on creating an intentional team culture from the very beginning. These techniques can also be used as stand alone techniques in retrospectives or shorter workshops.

How do you use this with your teams?

We encourage you to use these techniques with your team and have included all the material we have designed below.

We were fortunate to be accepted to present our Visual Thinking (Sketching outside the Box) workshop at Agile2017 this year in Orlando, Florida. All I can say is “Wow”! What an amazing experience meeting awesome, like-minded people from around the world. I did behave a bit like a groupie, and yes, possibly asked for some autographs…

I have compiled a little booklet of all of the sketchnotes that I did from the conference – some light reading until next year (and for those who may not have been able to attend).

Some highlights from Agile2017 below (all sketches are included in link above)…

Thank you Agile Alliance and all those who were involved in organising, and took the time to attend.

Check out #Agile2017 and #Agile17 to view the conversations from the conference. I was not the only sketchnoter at the conference, please check out the awesome sketches from the other visual thinkers there:

How do we improve education, both formally and informally? How do we create a culture of continuous learning? How do we stimulate entrepreneurship and innovation?

These are all extremely difficult questions, and although we may not have all the answers now, it’s inspiring to see people stepping up and actively trying to address some of these questions.

Suits & Sneakers

Mark Sham is one of these people. A few years ago he started Suits & Sneakers to offer people access to great speakers for free! He made an assumption: if we make access to inspirational and informative speakers available to people for free, that they would come to learn. And boy was he right!

Real Life MBA Conference

On Thursday 25 May, he had the 5th Suits & Sneakers event and it was packed! The next day, for the first time this year, he also organised a full day conference, Real Life MBA, with a line-up of 24 amazing speakers across 4 tracks. The idea behind this format is that there’s no way you can watch all the talks on one day. So in order to get the full value out of the conference, all the presentations were filmed and will be made available to view afterwards. Mark has challenged everyone at the conference to set up working groups with colleagues and friends to go through the remaining presentations in 12 weeks after the conference.

To do my small part, I’ve put together a mini “Sketchnoter’s Guide” for the Real Life MBA conference. It only has the presentations that I could attend on the day – you can download the PDF here.

The theme of the conference was “Harnessing the Power of Innovation” – a pressing topic in the project management industry both in South Africa and abroad. There were exceptional speakers at the conference who presented talks on a range of thought-provoking topics pertinent to the idea of innovation in project management.

In the spirit of the event, GetSmarter put together the Sketchnoter’s Guide to Innovation in Project Management – a downloadable collection of live sketchnotes from the day. The guide includes a host of visual representations of the day’s presentations including:

Moving from an efficiency-driven economy to an innovation-driven economy

Delivering innovation from concept to commercialisation

A comprehensive project management and project support services career path plan

Here is a sneak peek at some of the sketches and topics covered at the conference. To download the full guide, click here.

I was fortunate to be selected as a speaker. My colleague, Angie Doyle, and I facilitated a workshop on Visual Thinking for Agile Teams which was extremely well received – it’s exciting to see the interest and enthusiasm that people have for thinking visually! You can follow this link to view our “slides” from the workshop – all were created using flip charts.

I also used this opportunity to sketchnote the presentations and workshops I attended, there were lots of interesting topics. It’s always uplifting to get together with other Agile Practitioners and talk about what’s going on in the industry.

There was a lot of conversation and other sketchnoters (some new ones after the Visual Thinking workshop) who also posted sketches during the conference, to have a look at these you can check out the #SGZA and #SGZA2016 tags on Twitter.

I had the privilege of being invited to attend the BA Summit Southern Africa this year as the official Sketchnoter for the conference. The BA Summit is organised annually by the South African chapter of the IIBA, the IIBASA.

I must admit, I was extremely impressed by the high standard of the organisation of the event and the calibre of speakers. I thoroughly enjoyed it and hope that the sketchnotes reflect this.